Sam Haskins Blog

...as props and elements in sculpture.

I have always loved wooden chairs and often used them as planned or impromptu props. Here is a shot taken in my studio in Johannesburg in the sixties.

My nephew Marc Robinson, a sculptor in New York known for his figurative work, recently produced a sculpture 'Myth Monolith' consisting entirely of chairs and a couch, featured in the inaugural show of the New Museum in the Bowery New York. Both Marc's work and the museum itself met with critical acclaim. While his piece was featured in a wide range of press in the states and Canada plus blogs and art sites he scored a big hit with a mention in French Vogue.

The New Museum building itself deserves celebration and although the two famous principles at SANAA Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa have what can only be referred to as a super minimalist web site, you can find an interview and examples of their work on Designboom.com. A generous batch of images of both the exterior and interior of the building can be found on Skyscraperpage.com.

The opening of the Glasgow International Festival was featured in the London Telegraph this week and the article was also illustrated with a chair sculpture by Jim Lambie.

The 8th Istanbul Biennial in 2003 also produced a superb urban art installation - three stories high and made entirely of chairs. More images can be found here.

Technorati Tags:
60s, B&W Photograph, Making Photographs, Modern Sculpture, Glasgow International Festival
Istanbul Biennial

I was pleased to see Vanessa Winship, a British Photographer who lives in Turkey, win the Sony World Photography Awards Photographer of the Year. Her tender moving portraits of schoolgirls in Eastern Turkey are richly deserving of recognition.

No doubt Elliott Erwitt, heading the judging panel, helped to secure Vanessa her prize. It was good to see solid classical skill with a camera winning over contemporary fads.

She previously won a World Press Photo 1st prize for a portraiture story.

Technorati Tags: B&W Photography, History of Photography

Christies of London are holding their Spring auction of photographic prints on May 15th at King Street. The sale includes 8 prints by one of my favourite photographers, Mario Giacomelli. He really should have been included in the list of favourites that I posted in March and the omission has been corrected.

It is not the individual photo that’s important to me, but the series, the story.

Mario Giacomelli - in his last interview, 2000

Giacomelli’s passion for weaving narrative with his camera is close to my heart. In every image one sees him thinking like a painter, a graphic artist, a story teller and a master photographer.

Here are some samples from the prints for sales at Christies. The first image in the series has been cropped due to a gutter blemish from the catalogue scan.

Giacomelli was so passionate about planning his rural landscapes that he went to the extent of loaning tractors so that he could ‘draw’ his vision in the fields.

You can view the entire catalogue online here, the Giacomelli images start on page 90.

The web page for the sale can be found here.

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Black and White Photography,
B&W Photography,
History of Photography

George Lois was featured in this weekend's NYT. With my long career in advertising and photography, reading about the giants of the industry often brings back memories of stories or incidents. Very often the stories have their origins in that most extraordinary of decades, the sixties. Here is a cover (scanned from the copy in my library) of his book called 'Covering the Sixties'.

My wife Alida was on a visit to New York in 1967 to sell my book 'African Image' to our publishers. While there, she met George Lois, a giant figure in the design and advertising world. Living in Johannesburg at the time, we were exposed to his work mainly through the iconic covers he produced for Esquire Magazine. George told Alida about his love of African Art and the slide show about him in the NYT opens with a portrait of him sitting in front of pieces from his collection. He lamented to her that he still didn't own an African pot because they were mostly fired at low temperatures and all too often arrived in the States broken. Art shipping methods have improved somewhat since the 60s but it is not uncommon to see African pots in collections that have been carefully repaired, like the piece in the image below.

Alida remembered that some of my Tungsten Lights had arrived in boxes that were cleverly designed to protect the contents by suspending one box inside another with strong rubber bands in each corner. So we sent George a pot, almost identical to the one in my photograph below, and it duly reached him in NY, totally undamaged.

George has brought out a new book in collaboration with Tommy Hilfiger, a visual celebration of American graphic culture called 'Iconic America'.

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60s, African Image, Sam Haskins, Sixties, Tommy Hilfiger, George Lois